Today's contact management computer software programs allow their users to input, edit, store and retrieve information associated with business and/or personal contacts. Generally, for each contact, the information comprises a plurality of data elements which are representative of the contact's name, title, company name, business address, home address, electronic mail addresses, and one or more telephone numbers associated with business telephones, business facsimile devices, home telephones, home facsimile devices, and wireless telephones. Each data element, typically, includes a plurality of alphanumeric characters or symbols that are stored and retrieved from a database or data file employed by the contact management program.
In order to enable their international use, the contact management computer software programs may enable their users to select one or more languages that will be used by the programs for the input, editing, storage and retrieval of the information associated with contacts (i.e., the contact information). For those contact management programs that operate under present and older versions of the Microsoft® Windows® environment, each language is uniquely represented by a code page having a system-wide code page number setting which is established and stored during setup of the Microsoft® Windows® environment. Within each code page, each alphanumeric character or symbol of the selected language is represented by a code number. As a consequence, the same alphanumeric character in different languages might be represented by different code numbers, thereby requiring those contact management programs operating under present or older versions of the Microsoft® Windows® environment to utilize and consider both the code page number and code number of each alphanumeric character when manipulating, storing and retrieving data elements and their alphanumeric characters if such programs enable the simultaneous management of contacts using a plurality of languages. Because the use and consideration of both the code page number and code number necessarily requires more memory, storage space and processing power, such contact management computer software programs, typically, allow the management of contact information using only one language at a time and not the simultaneous use of more than one language.
The necessary use and consideration of both the code page number and code number for each alphanumeric character also makes more difficult the implementation and operation of “jump bars” that some contact management programs utilize to enable their users to more quickly locate contact information associated with a particular contact. Such “jump bars”, or “button bars”, include a plurality of user-selectable buttons with each button being labeled and associated with a range of alphanumeric characters. Upon selection of a button by a user, such contact management programs retrieve and display the contact information for contacts starting with those contacts having a last name that begins with the first alphanumeric character of the range of alphanumeric characters associated with the button. If the simultaneous use of multiple languages is permitted, the range of alphanumeric characters associated with each button must include both code page numbers and code numbers for such characters and the contact management program must make use of both the code page number and code numbers when attempting to retrieve and display desired contact information.
Therefore, there exists in the industry, a need for jump bar systems and methods for multi-language contact managers that enable users to quickly locate and/or jump to desired contact information, and that addresses these and other problems or difficulties which exist now or in the future.